The Marriage Plod

‘Byron Easy,’ by Jude Cook

By TOM SHONE

January 31, 2014

How disgusting the British find themselves! Let me rephrase that. If you were to go by the output of a certain strand of young, male British fiction writer, you could easily be forgiven for thinking the main activity of British life is being disgusted by the physical form of oneself and one’s fellows. Ian McEwan began a short story noting the peculiar smell asparagus lends the urine (“it suggests sexual activity of some kind between exotic creatures”). Martin Amis spent large parts of his early career detailing his characters’ bleeding gums and cracked molars. Will Self’s books come so awash in bodily fluids that if you were to throw them against a wall they’d most likely stick. Male self-disgust, rooted in the moist tumult of adolescence, and extended into one’s 20s and 30s under cover of literary careers aping the clinical imperturbability of Nabokov and Joyce, has almost bequeathed us its own genre. We might call it, in the manner of those outraged letters to British broadsheets, “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.”

And now we have Byron Easy, the young hero of Jude Cook’s first novel, sandwiched between the “Hogarthian mob” of an intercity train bearing him from the acrid underpasses and “haggard” pigeons of “sewery . . . London” toward his hometown in the north of England. Byron is a poet of the self-published and permanently wine-stained variety, his single claim to fame being a pamphlet of verse entitled “Hours of Endlessness.” In flight from a collapsed marriage, he ­busies himself with an unforgiving inventory of his fellow passengers (those “hawkers, tutters, scratchers, groaners, verbal diarrheics, carol-hummers, dribblers, tongue-lollers”) before zeroing in on a subject much closer to home — his estranged wife, his hatred of whom is to power the engine of Cook’s 500-page comic novel, “Byron Easy.”

That’s a lot of pages and a lot of hatred, but Mandy is some wife, “demanding, infuriating, instigating, inspiring” — less woman than weather condition, Hurricane Mandy. From the moment she first walked into the music shop where he works, bearing a busted amp in need of repair, Byron had her down as “a self-loather, an attention seeker, an hysteric, a sympathy junkie and expert manipulator.” But, he adds, “What can you do when you get on like an oil rig on fire?” A day trip to Brighton elicits a spontaneous proposal of marriage. A visit to a nightclub on the eve of their wedding prompts a spontaneous attack with a glass tumbler. In and out of the emergency room for injuries both real and imagined, Byron and Mandy soon find their marriage devolving into a round-the-clock screaming match, set against the penurious backdrop of North and East London, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in bedsitland.

Bad marriages can make for great fiction — look at “Madame Bovary” or “My Life as a Man” — although the trick, as Philip Roth realized, is an all-leveling honesty that spares the injured party nothing. Cook’s central character is consumed by self-hatred, which is not the same thing. A frazzled “car wreck of doomy neuroses and nightly death-dreams,” avoiding therapy like the plague, he spends much time sunk in lament for his terrible teeth and balding head, faults traversed and retraversed with Amisian reiteration — “a mouthful of spit, a gobful of gob,” “that dome of shameful retreat, that Dunkirk of the follicles.” We even get a dose of “millennial panic,” still loitering like a 14-year-late party pooper.

Cook can clearly write but he can also overwrite, in prose studded with literary name-drops and triple-word-score winners (“serpiginous,” “barratrous”). Comparing the sound of dogs shagging to a “small baby being murdered with a kebab scimitar” is a wicked visual, but does that scimitar significantly alter the sound that murdered baby makes? Providing a much-needed break are the softer ­passages detailing Byron’s childhood, an Eden of warm Edwardiana rudely shattered by the intrusion of a small-town Casanova into his parents’ marital bed. The overturned tables of that marriage soon merge with the chaos of Byron’s own, a parallel Cook doesn’t quite know what to do with, wedded as he is to maintaining Byron’s self-image as a doormat. “That’s what you get for surrounding yourself with unscrupulous, coercive, flagrant, equivocal, no-good people,” he concludes. It’s wan, unconvincing stuff and the reader soon tires of it. The other characters soon tire of it.

“Admit it, Bry,” says his drinking buddy after yet another pasting at the hands of Mandy. “You get a kick when you go over this stuff with me.” “Maybe, but I stand by the legitimacy of feeling my own pain till I die,” Byron responds, reiterating his opposition to the empowerments of therapy. “Good for you if you’ve mastered your own anguish.”

This is certainly bold, a proud flourish of anti-wisdom, within 100 pages of the finish line. Cook has written something new: a bildungsroman that refuses to bilden. No Damascan flashes, Eureka moments or slow, soft dawns of realization await Byron, who quotes Coleridge until he’s blue in the face rather than confront the most basic of facts about marriage: It involves two consenting adults. If Cook had really wanted to keep Byron’s vituperation intact, he should have read Kingsley Amis, not Martin, and filleted Mandy in a brisk, sharp 200 pages. One hopes that next time he’ll cut back on the cleverness — an overrated quality in a novelist — and seek out the ley lines undergirding his fiction. The good news is, they are there.